In a traditional broadcast or cable television environment, content providers, such as a cable network operator or a broadcast television operator, send video contents, such as movie and television (TV) programming, to TV sets to be viewed by end users. Although end users have a large number of contents to choose from, they can only choose to view the contents provided by the content providers and cannot share their own contents to be viewed by other end users.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus for media content sharing in a packet network, e.g., an IPTV network.